Nancy Miller Hunts for Roots on Three Continents

Search for Jewish Family Leads From Arizona to Kishinev to Arizona

What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish PastBy Nancy K. Miller
University of Nebraska Press, 248 pages, $24.95

Although Nancy Miller calls this book a memoir, it is in many ways more a family detective story, tracking a set of clues back into the past and across the globe. Or, perhaps better, it exemplifies how writing a memoir can move an author onto the openly shifting grounds of memory, where her own need — she’s “starved for stories”— is revealed and explored. On those shifting grounds, the fragmentary and uncertain nature of “a Jewish past” also becomes visible.

Miller’s task in “What They Saved” begins with her inheritance, at the death of her father, of a set of artifacts that feels loaded with mystery and significance: maps and family photographs; a tallis and tefillin; locks of hair in an old French soap box. Relentlessly curious — the early refrain, “I had to know more” repeats over and over, still voracious: “I wanted more” — the author embarks on a set of dramatic journeys, retracing “the geography of my past.”

Miller flies to Arizona to find out more about the uncle, her father’s long-dead brother to whom, mysteriously, her father had never introduced his own children; she returns to the abandoned lots outside Jerusalem in which her grandmother had hopefully invested in the 1920s from her home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She travels — twice — to Kishinev, where she hires translators, guides and an archivist to help her become immersed in the world not only of pogroms, but also of the quotidian life that her ancestors left behind when they immigrated to America. The task seems never-ending. As steadily as she finds answers to the questions raised by the packets of letters, the initialed cigarette case, the uncaptioned family photos, new faces and names continue to emerge: “These missing people haunt me.”

Marcia Ciriello Photography

This book’s force lies less in the particular interest of Miller’s immigrant, upwardly mobile family’s story than in her own story-hungry presence, in the “project of rerooting, rerouting, reimagining” that drives her. Although that project occasionally entangles readers in a thicket of information about her family, it demonstrates, throughout, an admirable level of nerve and of risk taking on Miller’s part as a writer. Like many other academics drawn over the past decade into the raw vicissitudes of the first person, Miller puts herself in a revealing position, from which her career-long authority as a scholar is invisible: “Amerikanka looking for her babushka” is the humbling introduction that she must accept from her Russian guide.

Taking that risk of public embarrassment is precisely what reaps Miller her most satisfying rewards. Both her story finding and her story making enable Miller to claim her place in “an imagined community of ancestors.” And ultimately, they enable Miller, who from the start is conscious of having no children of her own — of her “place at the end of the line” — to make a claim to her readers as her heirs: “I’ve at least made that move outward to the readers who share the dilemma of uncertain origins and unrootedness, and wasn’t that the point of the journey?”

Miller’s journey testifies to the emotional satisfactions of reconstructing the lost world beneath “the impenetrable layers of family silences.” It also illuminates the stubborn centrality of mystery and of loss in the “Jewish past.” The conditions of marginality and displacement to which Miller reconnects when she follows her family back to Kishinev and Bratslav rendered information fragile and unreliable, and had a psychic and cultural impact that remains difficult for her to reconstruct or even to fully grasp. If the pogroms’ effacement of belonging rendered them, as Miller suggestively calculates, “the opposite of home,” the experience of transience that they set in motion deeply shaped a generation of Eastern European Jews and made them strangers in many ways to their privileged, secure American descendants. Miller’s stories of her own extended family in the United States hint, as well, to the possibility that silence became a strategy of upward mobility among her relatives — like that lost uncle, whose effort to reinvent himself ended “with the same kind of obscure gangster messiness” as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”

As many excellent recent books and films — Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2006 “The Lost”; this year’s “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza,” by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, and Joseph Dorman’s 2011 documentary “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness” — attest, the fugitive qualities of the “Jewish past” remain among its most compelling creative imperatives. In each of these cases, the excruciating proximity of loss infuses a narrative of recovery not only with drama and suspense but also, as it does for Miller, with both imperative and sadness.

Miller’s reading of the occasion of the studio family portrait as a rite of farewell among her ancestors on the eve of their departure from their communities in Russia, a world about to be erased, is one of the most poignant moments in this book. Miller manages to “save” both an at-risk history and her own previously unacknowledged connection to it. She completes the quest on which she set out at the start of the book in the presence of the resonant fragments left to her by her father, yet at the same time insists that her family history and her personal history remain “suspended between lost and found.”

Miller’s suspension of the expectation of closure — her acceptance of the condition of remembering and of writing as forever incomplete — also draws her memoir deeply into the emotional experience of change that shaped modernity for Jews all over the world. And it confirms the importance of personal narrative, perhaps modernity’s most recognizable voice, in framing and accepting the losses and the uncertainties of that experience.

Joanne Jacobson teaches American literature, American studies and creative writing at Yeshiva University. She is currently working on a family memoir.

Top Stories

The Jewish Daily Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, The Jewish Daily Forwardrequires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, our spam filter prevents most links and certain key words from being posted and The Jewish Daily Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.

It's only been a day since Trevor Noah was appointed Jon Stewart's The Daily Show successor, and he's now being slammed for old anti-Semitic tweets.
What do you think of Noah's tweets? Let us know in the comments.

Israel's own Black Panthers once latched onto the #Passover story to challenge Ashkenazi domination. The radicals issued their own Haggadah, which mentioned strikes and injustice — but not God.

Fans of the The Daily Show are wondering how new host, Trevor Noah, will address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Well, his past posts on social media indicate he probably won’t be appearing at next year’s AIPAC conference

#Passover is now five days away. That means matzo, matzo, and more matzo — kind of a mood killer. Here are 6 things you should watch to get you revved up for Seder.

Even though it's often men who lead the Seder in traditional Jewish families, Avi Shafran believes that the Seder itself is maternal in its quality and purpose.

From our friends at Kveller.com, need something delicious for a Passover snack? How about this potato pizza kugel!

#Passover is especially meaningful — and challenging — when you're converting. Take it from Kelsey Osgood, who felt like a 'stranger in a strange land' at her first Seder.

Ex-Navy Seal Eric Greitens is plunging into the GOP primary for #Missouri governor — the same race shaken by the suicide of a candidate dogged by an anti-Jewish 'whisper campaign.'

"My cousin and I are both dating non-Jews who are considering converting. Is it wrong to ask our dad to tone down the Seder this year so they get a nicer impression of Judaism?"
Check out the advice in this week's #Seesaw: http://jd.fo/p8Jdx

In her now infamous New Yorker piece, Lena Dunham acted like an outsider looking in. Doing this made it not just unfunny but anti-Semitic, J.E. Reich says.

In Rabat, Jonathan Katz found more tolerance for Jews than he’s seen in many "clean and safe" Western cities. So why is #Morocco often described as "dirty and dangerous"?

As far as we know, Abraham Lincoln never said, "Some of my best friends are Jewish." But clearly he could have.

How does it feel to be hot on the trail of a book that some people say never existed? Just ask Niles Elliot Goldstein, who became obsessed with tracking down Bruno Schulz's long-lost novel.

Is #Passover still women’s work? The first installment of our "Who Sets the Table?" series is about to find out! You can help by letting us know how the holiday prep breaks down in your home: http://jd.fo/s85QV

Vayter / ווײַטער: A biweekly blog presenting original Yiddish articles, fiction, essays, videos and art by young writers and artists.

We will not share your e-mail address or other personal information.

The Forward occasionally sends promotional e-mails to our subscribers on behalf of selected sponsors, whose advertising supports our independent journalism. We hope you will look at their messages and find their offers interesting to you, but if you would like to opt out of receiving them, please uncheck this box.